The Old Blood Part 32

Sound was its barometer. Farther and farther the voice of the guns had travelled, but never out of hearing. It hovered at one point as the t.i.tanic struggle came to a decision. The three talked little; consciously or unconsciously, they were always listening for something from the distance. No newspapers; no letters; no telegrams! Only flagellating wonder and suspense! All the world behind dense curtains of secrecy, not knowing whether, when they were drawn, there would be sunlight or black night outside.

Helen went on with her sketching or pretended to, but found herself staring at the paper and listening and praying for France. Twice Henriette attempted to continue with the portrait, but she made no progress. All three read a good deal, Helen by herself, slipping away from the other two when they were together. They awakened and they went to sleep to the echo of low thunder, thunder marching in a treadmill. Then there were lapses when the guns were not heard, and something seemed to catch in their throats. Had the Germans won? When the wind changed and the rumble became distinct again, what relief!

Their steps seemed always to lead to the terrace, for there they could hear more plainly; and there they would walk up and down after dinner, the dew-moist air soft against their faces, Phil in the middle, with the voices of the two girls so alike that they seemed to express a delightful cousinship in one personality. He had ceased to think of the future. Everything waited on the result of the battle. At times he wished for action; that he, too, might be striking some kind of a blow.

Those strolls in the darkness and the voice in his ears, now Helen's, now Henriette's, seemed to have become a part of his life; something from which he would never be disa.s.sociated. It was the symbol for Henriette, frightened and helpless, as he carried her to the gully and for Helen emerging, with triumph shining in her eyes, from the dust and smoke of the sh.e.l.l that had exploded between them. Helen had a little prayer for France which she used to repeat, sometimes softly, again belligerently with hands clenched.

"As if prayers did any good!" she said. "Only killing counts! A butcher boy from Berlin could fire a sh.e.l.l that would destroy the Venus di Milo."

"France will win because there is still a G.o.d in heaven!" was the rallying judgment of Jacqueline, when everybody was blue.

Up at dawn, sweeping, dusting, and scouring, it was she who brought the first glorious word. She burst into Helen's room, awakening her with a cry of:

"It's nearer--nearer! Listen!"

Helen ran to Henriette's room and then she pounded on Phil's door.

Could imagination be deceiving them again? Phil slipped into his clothes and hurried out to the terrace. He could see the burst of light smoke once more against the green of the hills which had hidden the battle, and transport going to the rear along the road was more numerous. Only ammunition trucks and ambulances were moving forward.

He ran back to the house in schoolboy delight, shouting the news.

"They will dent my saucepans, will they," said Jacqueline, "and rub sausage grease into my floors!"

She, too, went to the terrace to watch that unfolding panorama of German retreat; of cavalry which was covering it caught in the hot breath of the _soixante-quinze_; of guns which were covering it forced back from position to position.

Staggering through the village street came the conquerors of yesterday, their glazed eyes under heavy lids, keeping dogged step from force of long discipline--they who were not to see Paris! French sh.e.l.l-fire kept approaching till shrapnel began to break over the village. Again the three had to take to the cellar, where for a while they heard the rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire and an occasional cheer--a kind of cheer that sounded strangely familiar to Phil. When they came upstairs the figures pa.s.sing in the village street were no longer in green, but in khaki. The remnants of the little British army which had retreated from Mons was tasting the joy of pursuit.

Everybody in the village was out, lining the road; everybody, from Mere Perigord to infants in arms, displaying the smiles they had been conserving while they had been glaring at the Germans. The children gathered flowers and tossed them to _les Anglais_ before their eyes in the life, looking just as they had looked in the picture papers.

"How do you like being a conquering hero, Bill?" one _Anglais_ called to another, as he stuck a rose in his cap and relit the "f.a.g" cigarette stump which he had been saving behind his ear in the midst of charges and sh.e.l.l-fire. Plodding stoically on, these regulars, taking the day's work as it came, and this was a day's work to their liking. "Are we down-hearted? No!" Every one of them looked at Phil. There was no mistaking him; he must speak English. The lean, tired officers waved their hands in greeting to the young man and two girls who were beaming the welcome of their hearts.

"Sorry we can't stay to tea!" one called merrily.

It was a suggestion. Afternoon tea for the English! An opportunity for the chateau to furnish an important British munition of war, as the battalion halted waiting orders from somebody up ahead! Jacqueline made a pail of tea, which the three pa.s.sed out, along with slices of bread spread with jam as long as there was any left.

"Jolly good of you!" said the officers. "Such good tea, too--and jam!

This takes a bit of beating. Thanks awfully!"

The battalion pa.s.sed on with the tide of battle.

"This is the only time that I have not felt perfectly helpless," said Helen. "There is so little a woman can do when fighting is all that counts."

"I was thinking of that myself," said Phil. "How helpless I am, though an able-bodied man!"

"But you did knock a German down!" said Helen, with one of her mischievous glances.

From the terrace they could now see the French everywhere, in the ravines and on the roads, sweeping across the fields in the wonderfully ordered system of a great army which had had generations of training.

"It is good--good--good!" said Helen.

They had recovered something which they had lost: the sense of freedom.

The chateau and the grounds were once more their own; their minds and their souls were their own. Jacqueline's exaltation expressed itself in an amazingly good dinner; Helen's in a series of fresh cartoons over their coffee, which included "our hero" from the Southwest knocking down the German.

A call from the cure brought word that trains would begin running to Paris on the morrow, which was a reminder to all that their period of isolation was over; and for Phil a strange and memorable holiday would be at an end. Helen went out with the cure and Phil and Henriette turned up the path. After they had watched the flashes of the guns in the distance for a while, they started walking slowly back and forth.

"I don't know what we should have done if you had not been here," she said.

"At least, I kept you in the cellar! Are you glad that you came?" he asked.

"I would not have missed it for worlds!" answered Henriette. "And I owe it to you."

"No, to Helen. But for her we should have been in Paris."

"Yes, that's true," she replied thoughtfully. "And what would have become of her if we had not come?"

"Gone on sketching until a sh.e.l.l hit her, I should say."

"Or until she saw a wounded man and fainted! But there is something that I do owe to you and to you alone," Henriette went on softly. "I am appalled when I think of it--of the obligation. I--well----" now one of her trickling, enchanting laughs. "There's the portrait to repay you! I think that we might have a sitting in the morning."

Here a white figure appeared around the corner of the path, and they were face to face with Helen. She drew back in the embarra.s.sment of one conscious of more than a mere inadvertent intrusion.

"I was going to look at the gun-fire for a minute," she said. It might have been Henriette's voice suddenly changing the subject. She had on the simple gown whose cut was the same as Henriette's, who had dressed for dinner that evening with her usual care. Something in Helen's distraitness, a sense of her loneliness, aroused an impulse in Phil.

"Make it three!" said he. He went to her, took her hand and drew her arm into his. She seemed to resist slightly and then to yield almost tremblingly. Henriette also slipped her arm into his.

"Cousins!" she exclaimed, a happy thought in view of the situation in more ways than one.

They paced on together, two white slippers moving from under white skirts against the dark earth in unison with his own steps. Cousins!

But any reason for his remaining at Mervaux was past.

"Now I shall go to Paris to-morrow," said Phil, "and inform your mother, wherever she is, that you are all right, and get off a cable to an old couple in Longfield which will stop their worrying."

"I think that we had better go with you," said Henriette. "Don't you, Helen?"

"Yes, to Paris!" said Helen, with such definiteness that it surprised her sister. Her mind was no less fixed than when she had decided to remain alone at Mervaux. She and her thousand francs and her sketches were going to America in the hazard of new fortunes. "I only ran up to see the gun-fire and I think I'll look in on Mere Perigord and get her views on the state of affairs in France," she added, starting to withdraw her hand; but Phil held it fast.

"Our last night together at Mervaux," he said. "Let Mere Perigord wait."

Something strong and irresistible in his grip made her yield; but he could not see the twinge in her features hidden by the darkness. It was torture for her, this promenade with the man to whom she had said "Yes." The desire for flight had never been so strong; flight from Mervaux and all old a.s.sociations to new worlds.

They had ceased to talk as they kept on rhythmically pacing in the dark, each with his own thoughts. Phil, looking backward now when the strain had pa.s.sed, saw the whole experience at Mervaux with a sense of personal incompetency; as a helpless spectator of action.

"I'm getting sleepy!" Helen pleaded at last.

"So am I," Phil replied. "Four more turns!"

He did not like to part with their companionship in the faint starlight this last evening at Mervaux.

"You will go straight to America?" Henriette asked, as they started toward the house.

"I think so, if I can catch a steamer. I imagine that not one-tenth of the homeward rush has been accommodated yet."